We all come from the Adams family. Our family inheritance is our “earth suit” with its selfish nature. We are simply vessels of clay. As it ages, clay cracks, crumbles and disintegrates. We have also inherited a world that is cracking, disintegrating, corroding and falling apart. We inhabit a world that is moving in a completely different direction from what God has planned. This world has a magnetic-like influence on us. If you are not making a conscious effort to stay out of its influence, you will be pulled in, and, before you realize it, stuck to the magnet. Because of this downward pull, we need to constantly look to God’s Word to keep us focused.
Many years ago, the author of “The Robe,” Lloyd C. Douglas, was a university student living in a boarding house. Downstairs on the first floor was an elderly, retired music teacher who was infirmed and unable to leave the apartment. Douglas said that every morning they had a ritual. Douglas went down the steps, opened the old man’s door and asked, “Well, what’s the good news?” The old man picked up his tuning fork, tapped it on the side of the wheelchair and said, “That’s middle C! It was middle C yesterday, it will be middle C tomorrow; it will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune, but, my friend, that is middle C!” We need a standard that never changes.
I am told that a compass needs calibration. Over time, the hull of a ship builds up a magnetism that interferes with the ship’s compass. True north is no longer true north. To remove this influence, the captain takes the ship over special coils. The Bible is your special coil for life. It will keep you on true north and keep you calibrated so that you are headed in the right direction. Without it, we maneuver our own way — and it seems like the harder we try, the further off true north we veer.
I read about a man in a county jail in Australia. He concocted a scheme to escape. Each day, he watched as a delivery truck arrived at the loading dock. There was a time during each delivery in which the truck was left alone. At that very moment, he crawled under the truck. As the truck drove away, he held on in fear for his life until it finally came to a rolling stop. As he quietly crept from under the truck, he realized in utter dejection that he was now in the State Penitentiary five miles down the road, still surrounded by walls!
When we rely on ourselves, we find that we go from one prison of discontent to the next. We search and search for answers to what will solve our problems without the compass to guide us. God has given us His compass in the Scriptures to guide us through the waters of life.
We are all dependent on something. That is why we need discipline. Discipline without dependence is arrogance — but dependence without discipline is laziness. We play a great part in the successfulness of our lives. Some Christians live with the idea, “Whatever will be, will be.” That is not in the Bible; that is Doris Day.
Practicing spiritual discipline keeps our compass on true north. A thousand monkeys pounding on a thousand pianos will never result in a piece by Beethoven. It takes disciplined learning, not random pounding, to produce good music. If we don’t discipline ourselves, we won’t be successful. It will just be random pounding on the pavement of life.
Most of us live life like the old farmer in Tennessee. When lightning struck his old barn, it saved him from having to tear it down. The rain washed his car, and it saved him from that chore, too. When asked what he was doing on the porch during the harvest, he replied that he was waiting for an earthquake to shake the potatoes out of the ground. That is the way a lot of us are. We are waiting for God to do the miracle.
I have discovered that when we do the mundane down here, then miracles flow from up there. Our disciplined choices allow us to do what we could not do by willpower alone. The AA program of recovery works only when people arrange their lives around certain disciplines and choices. In a sense, they train their willpower to allow the Higher Power to work in their lives. This happens when they believe in their heart that God has a better way.
The bottom line: If you are trying to take a bone away from a dog, he will put up a fight. Let me tell you how to take a bone away from even the meanest dog. You offer the dog a steak. The only way people will give up the old bones of this world is for them to see that God is offering them a steak. He offers abundant life, the best life.